Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

GitHub has recently raised a massive $100 million in funding. The important question is, what is it and how is it important at all?

The social media is suddenly abuzz over the social network known as GitHub. GitHub is already a fairly well-known and familiar network in that it is known as the real digital, professional hang-out of programmers and coders. However, the scope of the network goes well beyond that.

What is GitHub?
GitHub is created around a project which is called ‘Git.’ This project was actually developed by Linus Torvalds, who is naturally very well-known as being the creator of Linux. Git actually is a kind of a repository where multiple versions and revisions of different projects can be stored and eventually accessed.

Why is it important?
This explains the immense popularity GitHub enjoys among programmers. Programmers nearly always have to write multiple iterations of their code as well as add different improvements and modules to it. GitHub is an excellent tool in chronologically discerning this entire development and learning from it. For instance, you can see how a lot of great programmers cracked certain hard nuts by looking up their code revisions of that project on GitHub.

Moreover, given such nature of GitHub, the programmers are able to present smaller changes without having to connect to the server. All the programmers have to do is to download the whole repository to their systems, make the needed changes and then submit it. This way, a more refined, detailed timeline of revisions becomes possible.

A number of features are very popularly used on GitHub. For instance, there is the concept of ‘forking’ which basically allows you to get a project that’s by someone else on GitHub and then edit it on your own account. You can then even share the changes with the original owner of the project through a ‘pull request’ notification. If the owner likes it, he may merge your version with his, thus incorporating the changes you made.

$100 million in funding:
And now, the big news for GitHub, which has suddenly made it a hot topic online, is that it has been able to raise a whopping $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Whereass it is not clear how GitHub is going to use all that money, it seems that the company has a lot of plans in the pipeline and we may see some significant changes and addition to this social network.

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